People are still trickling into the lot in front of the Arcata Playhouse, thickening the crowd already encircling the low stage, where Marylyn Paik-Nicely, a “founding mother” of Humboldt Asians and Pacific Islanders in Solidarity (HAPI), stands in pink sneakers and a purple T-shirt commemorating this, the first Obon festival in Humboldt County, a cell […]
Japanese American
Posted inArts + Scene
Swing Time Travel: Photos and Video from the Taiko Swingposium
Last weekend, the San Jose Taiko Swingposium Immersive Theater Experience’s On the Road show transformed the Bayside Community Hall into a World War II-era dance hall in a Japanese-American incarceration camp. While under armed guard and having lost their homes, possessions and rights as Americans, those in the camps played music and held dances like these […]
Posted inNews
Taiko Swings up to Humboldt
Imagine a 1940s dance hall full of swing dancers sporting pin curls and pompadours moving to the big band sound of saxophones, trumpets and trombones. Now imagine the precision of traditional Japanese taiko drumming leading the beat and the dance taking place in the mess hall of a World War II Japanese American internment camp. […]